On one is to blame for suffering an evil he cannot avoid. The extraordinary capacity of the human mind to rewrite memory is a great healer. With the passage of time, events have been bleached of their intense horror. In contrast, those who have been traumatized and subsequently developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) did not modify their accounts; their memories are preserved essentially intact. Whether we remember a particular event at all, and how accurate our memories of it are, largely depends on how personally meaningful it was and how emotional we felt about it at the time. The key factor is our level of arousal. We all have memories associated with particular people, songs, smells, and places that stay with us for a long time. Most people who were alive at the time still have precise memories of where we were and what we saw on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, but only a fraction of us recall anything in particular about 10 September 2001.

We are all God’s children, let us do the best to make the good experiences outweigh the bad. Most day-to-day experience passes immediately into oblivion. On ordinary days, we do not have much to report when we get back to the house in the evening. The mind works according to schemes or maps, and incidents that fall outside of the established pattern are most likely to capture our attention. If we get a rise or a friend tells us some exciting news about selling banana muffins and lemon cupcakes, we will retain the details of the moment, at least for a while. We remember insults and injuries best: The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents into our minds. Even if the content of the remark fades, our dislike for the person who made it usually persists. 

When something terrifying happens, like seeing a child or friend get hurt in an accident, we will retain an intense and largely accurate memory of that event for a long time. The more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory will be. However, that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with horror—especially the horror of inescapable shock—this system becomes overwhelmed and breaks down. We cannot monitor what happens during a traumatic experience, but we can reactivate the trauma. When memory traces of the original sounds, images, and sensation are reactivated, the frontal lobe of the brain shuts down, including, as we have seen the region necessary to put feelings into words, the region that creates our sense of location in time, and the thalamus, which integrates the raw data of incoming sensations. At this point the emotional brain, which is not under conscious control and cannot communicate in words, takes over. 

The emotional brain (the limbic area and the brain stem) expresses its altered activation through changes in emotional arousal, body physiology, and muscular actions. Under ordinary conditions these two memory systems—rational and emotional—collaborate to produce an integrated response. However, high arousal not only changes the balance between them, but also disconnects other brain areas necessary for the proper storage and integration of incoming information, such as the hippocampus and the thalamus. As a result, the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives, but in fragmented sensory and emotion traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations. Julian saw someone he thought was his son, with a young lady, and he felt a sensation like his heart was about to stop—a panicked sense of dread. However, there was little or no story. There are decisions which people can make even now that are quite independent of such broadly based philosophical issues. There are steps that individual can take to combat loneliness at the individual level.

Even in an idealized social utopia, every individual would most likely experience some type of loneliness during their lives. Thus, far more problematical than a person’s initial experiences with loneliness is his response to it. Even in its milder forms, loneliness hurts. It creates an uncomfortable feeling from which people almost immediately try to escape. The problem is that loneliness can be like a spider’s web; if a person struggles to escape, he may become all the more enmeshed, until he becomes so entangled that escape is impossible. Many reactions to loneliness lead inexorably to greater isolation. Many of us are actively battling against the lack of love in our society, and yet their struggle leads to more loneliness because they equate love with objects. They try to find lobe through the use of objectivity, an intellectual response that can only lead to greater isolation. So enjoy your freedom, family, and friends, and be kind to others. Have a great weekend.